Western Digital Unveils Its First Serial Attached SCSI Hard Drive

Western Digital has finally announced its first ever Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard disk drive for enterprises after years of reluctance to enter the SAS market. The new S25 drive hardly looks like a completely new product, but as a re-engineered VelociRaptor Enterprise Serial ATA drive that was originally designed for servers, workstations and performance enthusiasts.

“Our entry into the traditional-enterprise market continues the strategic expansion and diversification of WD's broad market and product portfolio, and significantly increases our addressable revenue opportunity. WD will approach the traditional enterprise space with the same focus on quality, customer service, technology and value that has earned us strong positions," said John Coyne, president and chief executive officer of WD.

WD S25 features 300GB capacity, 10 000rpm rotational speed, 16MB cache, 3.6ms read seek time, 4.2ms write seek time, 0.7ms track-to-track seek time and average latency of 3ms. Seek times of WD S25 are slightly better compared to VelociRaptor Enterprise, still, it does seem that S25 is substantially based on its predecessor designed for SATA. Besides faintly higher performance, WD S25 also offers 1.6 million hours meantime before failure (MTBF), whereas the VelociRaptor can only boast with 1.4 million hours MTBF.

The WD S25 is now available to select OEMs and shipments have begun to the two largest OEMs in the industry.

"We are thrilled to launch a mission-critical-class hard drive to these high-end OEM customers. This new family of SAS products adds to our existing large capacity SATA near-line enterprise product portfolio. This first product is the foundation upon which we will expand into the previously untapped traditional enterprise market,” said Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of WD's enterprise storage solutions business unit.